Resting Uneasy

The past eight weeks have not been a test of strength or will as much as they have been a test of patience. The initial weeks were easy going, but thereafter I experienced a mounting frustration at the pervasive selfishness and lack of self-discipline and pride. What was worse was that these attitudes and the problems that clearly arose as a result were not addressed in any meaningful way; this only encouraged their perpetuation. 

In such an environment, it becomes very easy to do just as well as everyone else, even if that means to cheat where you can and to cheat together. To put it in the terms I did makes things clear-cut, but when one is in the thick of things, the argument sounds more like, ‘There’s nothing wrong with doing enough to get by.’ I think the past weeks have been a test of integrity as well, though not one that I can claim to have always passed. What successes I have had in this area were not of myself, in any case. 

Overall, I think the past weeks have been a challenge, but one that has been far from straightforward. Being straightforward to myself about what I know I should or shouldn’t do or join in has required some effort, but at the same time, doing the right thing or the better thing has not always been straightforward. I find that I’ve had to go about things differently sometimes, because there are things about people and groups of people I could no longer take for granted. 

I think my biggest takeaway from the course is my dissatisfaction, not just with the circumstances, but also with my responses to them. I hope that my conviction that things could have been better and that I could have done better at or been wiser about bringing some measure of change about will serve as some kind of motivation, even as I recognize that most of my frustration was in itself fruitless, and that there is a real limit to what can be accomplished at a given time and place.